The logical extension of this is as audiences change, it is critical to set aside your assumptions about who they are and what they want and go find out. This is why customer/audience persona development from a psychological perspective is so important.

Traditional methods of user research and requirements gathering have served UX practitioners well in shaping our designs and redesigns of products and services. But as systems become more complex and users go beyond the screen, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get accurate data on why our users, customers, and employees are doing the things they do.

It is interesting to see how popular Facebook was at one time. Especially since a lot of teens were beginning to become more internet savvy. Having that large of a following is so influential to the young minds out there. Great information provided.

Quote "Sound and Vision has gained access to video of the Dutch TV program Tussen Kunst & Kitsch (similar to the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow) which is a production of the public broadcaster AVRO. The general aim of the scenario is to describe how the information need of the Tussen Kunst & Kitsch viewers can be satisfied from both their couch and on-the-go, supporting both passive and more active needs. Linking to external information and content, such as Europeana, museum collections but also auction information has been incorporated in these scenarios"

"The study concluded that teacher presence had no significant relation to course completion, most badges awarded, intent to register in subsequent MOOCs or course satisfaction."

"However, the findings is predicted by my Interaction Equivalency Theory in which I argue that if one of the three forms of student interaction (student-student, student-teacher, student content) is at a high level, the other two can be reduced or even eliminated."

That it is possible to learn on one's own is not exactly a surprise. Otherwise there would be no autodidacts, nobody would ever have been able to learn from a book. Surprising, though, that the presence of a teacher seems to have no impact on the learning outcome. On the other hand... students taking part in MOOCs usually have an academic background already. So they developed learning strategies and are able to compensate the absence of a teacher by interacting with other students or looking for other sources.

Anderson has a provocative post discussing a recent study by Tomkin and Charlevoix (2014) reporting that MOOC course satisfaction, completion or decision to enroll in another MOOC had no relationship with teacher interaction or presence in the MOOC. This kind of thing always gets teachers' panties in a bunch, as we know. Anderson argues that these results are predicted by his "Interaction Equivalency Theory where one of the three forms of student interaction (student-student, student-teacher, student content) is at a high level, the other two can be reduced or even eliminated. " As an online prof, I would argue that to get the equivalency over to the student-student or student-content side of the triangle, the course and content have to be very artfully and intentionally designed by the teacher with a great investment of time and skill. So there's presence of interaction and there's presence by design. It's presence by design to structure social and content engagement that allows the more traditional 'teacher presence' to be missing. The exciting thing is that is has much leverage. As a side note, people shouldn't assume that these arguments are meant to throw teachers out of the classroom and make all classes instructorless. Humans are social animals and good teachers provide mentoring and social connection in ways far beyond course content that are difficult in the scale of a MOOC. These are important questions, however, as part of the quest to find ways of making quality education available to the millions who don't have the access to educational opportunities most of us take for granted.

Tomkin, J. H., & Charlevoix, D. (2014). Do professors matter?: using an a/b test to evaluate the impact of instructor involvement on MOOC student outcomes. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2566245

This article made so much sense to me that I had to sit down and listen to the podcast right away. Here's some comments that stood out for me:

Brands are struggling. What's missing is conflict.

Need to inject conflict without damaging the brand.

Too many provide a false picture – everything is wonderful.

Have to (provide and) overcome the conflict or the listener won’t like it.

Conflict – get as close as possible to death.

Conflict – best kind of universal truth.

How to find your org/brands conflict? Need to take a softer look at the notion of conflict (the term conflict brings up certain imagery, feelings). Conflict is simply something to overcome. Ask yourself - do we want to be a company who wants to overcome things?

There's also a great made-up example (Donut Corp) provided of how an organization could find it's conflict.

"Maybe you're meandering, alone and lost, through an abandoned castle surrounded by a crocodile-filled moat. Suddenly, a flame-breathing dragon hurls towards you, snarling and gnashing its teeth, coming in for the kill. Do you wake up from this bizarro nightmare, covered in sweat and close to tears? Or do you stay in the dream, grab your imaginary sword, and walk boldly into battle?

If your answer is the latter, then Jayne Gackenbach would suspect you're also a hardcore gamer...."

There are divergent things happening in the product and interaction design community. On one hand, we have some amazing pieces of writing from the likes of Ryan Singer and Julie Zhuo, moving our craft forward.

danielle's insight:

it's really important to remember that UX is about impressing the USER, not your peers!

'Science confirms what Buzzfeed and Upworthy already know: In the hierarchy of digital contagion content that evokes powerful emotions floats mercilessly to the top....

If the traffic numbers don't already show the wisdom of Zimmerman's approach, the behavioral evidence certainly does. Recent research suggests that emotions hold the secret to viral web content. Articles, posts, or videos that evoke positive emotions have greater viral potential than something that evokes negative feelings, but both do a better job recruiting clicks than neutral content. The finer details tell a similar story: triggering high-arousal emotions, such as anger or humor, is a surer path to click gold than triggering low-arousal ones, such as contentment or sadness....'

Great article by Frank Rose. Of particular interest to me was the underground map showing the linkages between the various areas of storytelling. First, I'm always interested in how stories translate into visual representation. Second, when you look at different 'stops on the lines' you can see how quickly the world is becoming transmedia, to the point of making that term redundant or perhaps equivalent to a 'coordinated and creative use of media tools to craft and extend a story.' We might more accurately the underground stops hubs and nodes given the interretlationships among platforms and the increasingly blurry boundaries that aren't shown. However the subway/underground metaphor more clearly allows content to ride a type of media. Yet Mad Men, for example, really intersects other lines because , among other things, of fan co-creation. The map itself raises interesting questions, such as where do you define 'real world'? Is that a marker of the story's origins or where it is experienced? But any visual metaphor or article that gets you asking good questions is effective in my book. And Frank is always good at that.

""Storytelling is like sex" wrote David Mamet, "everyone can do it, some of us are better at it than others."

After three years of studying non-fiction storytelling, and publishing a book and a magazine on the subject, in October 2013 I tweeted 50 things I've learned about storytelling, with the hashtag #story50. All fifty tips have been compiled and extended into this presentation."

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